Chris Hardwick spearheads the revenge of The Nerdist

You can call him a nerd to his face if you want: Chris Hardwick won’t take offence. It would be hard for him, anyway, since he created the Nerdist Podcast, a weekly interview program about “what it really means to be a nerd.”

A TV version of Nerdist bows later this month on BBC America and Space here in Canada, but followers of The Walking Dead already know Hardwick from his post-Dead talk show Talking Dead.

The Walking Dead’s audience recently topped 11.5 million viewers, and many of those viewers hang around to hear Hardwick and his rotating panel of weekly guests deconstruct what they’ve just seen on the screen.

Talking Dead proved popular enough last season that AMC expanded the show to a full hour earlier this year.

Nerdist — which itself has expanded from its humble origins to include a premium content YouTube channel, podcast offshoots and a cross-platform newsletter, Nerdist News — is a logical extension of a not-so-radical concept: A talk show about nerd culture hosted by and featuring people who actually know what they’re talking about. Nerdist podcast topics draw on everything and everyone from MythBusters star Adam Savage to Clerks and Silent Bob filmmaker, Comic Book Men TV impresario and unapologetic fanboy Kevin Smith.

Chris Hardwick on his new show, The Nerdist.

Nerdist Podcast ranked No. 3 in a recent Rolling Stone list of the 10 best comedy podcasts of the moment. A podcast episode was recorded live — at midnight — at Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival in 2011.

Guests over the years — Nerdist Podcast bowed in February 2010 — have ranged from comics maestro Stan Lee and TV actors Jeri Ryan and Drew Carey to rocker Ozzy Osbourne and cast members from Doctor Who, Community and Star Trek: The Next Generation, among other, similarly styled shows.

Hardwick considers himself a Doctor Who evangelist, not that there’s anything wrong with that. He believes there are still potential Who converts roaming free in the fanboy world, waiting to see the light. Nerdist’s TV debut coincides with the return of the newly reinvented Doctor Who’s seventh season in the U.S. and Canada later this month.

Hardwick fell into Nerdist Podcast almost by accident. He was a struggling standup comic at the time. He had a hard time finding bookings and filing comedy clubs. No one knew who he was, or what his comedy material involved. Podcasting seemed a natural way to spread the word.

“Podcasting is a survival mechanism,” Hardwick explained, earlier this year in Los Angeles. “As starting comedians, we need a way to express ourselves in public in a way that tells them this is who we are, this is what we’re about, these are the things we want to talk about. Podcasts have become the comedy albums of today.

“When I was a kid, you’d listen to the same comedy album 20, 30, 50 times. Today, we’re spoiled as consumers. We’re like, ‘More! More!’ Podcasts provide that for people. They’re like a non-stop comedy album.”

Hardwick says the idea of pitching a nerd culture show to TV executives would have been unthinkable only 10 years ago.

“As far as nerd culture goes, they would have laughed in your face if you’d suggested anything like the Nerdist. I didn’t start the podcast or website thinking, ‘Now is the time to create an industry.’ It was more that I was feeling suffocated in the entertainment business.

“Times have changed. Today, there’s so much power in nerd culture. When you hold a tablet, look at the warm, artificial glow of light that’s reflecting off your face: Jocks did not build those. Maybe they did the manual labour, but nerds told them what to do.

“There’s a lot of power in nerd culture, in video games, films, TV. We figured that out a long time ago I think, but it took a while for the industry to catch up. Nerd culture is so ubiquitous now it’s part of who we are. The fact that my mom knows what 4G means is crazy.”

Chris Hardwick

Hardwick is not looking to take over the world with Nerdist. He’s not Brain from the old Pinky and the Brain cartoons.

“I want this weekly show to feel like, ‘You’ve watched Doctor Who, you’ve watched Orphan Black, now welcome to our show. We’re going to pick you up and gently cuddle you into your bed. We’re like a snuggle for your brain.’ Does that make sense? We want this to be a nice, little, fun kind of nerdy hangout session at the end of your sci-fi night.”

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile